The goal for this batch was “can we brew it in 3 hours?”. We started heating strike water at 8:10am and were cleaned up by 11:30am.

We saved time in a couple ways:

30 minute mash with a fine crush; our recirculating E-BIAB system can deal with finely ground grain, which speeds up conversion. We reached full conversion (tested with iodine) with time to spare.

Short boil: we used high-alpha bittering hops to increase bitterness from the 20 minute addition, which is calculated at 53 IBU between the Target and EKG.

No-chill; we dump boiled wort directly into sanitized kegs for fermentation, so there is little risk of infection by not chilling. This also increases bitterness as the hop alpha acids are still being isomerized while the boiling wort is chilling. We left the wort in an unheated space at 35F for 24 hours before pitching yeast.

We achieved 80% efficiency on our mash, with 4 gallons of 1.028 wort, to which we added the 6lbs of Pils extract. Our original gravity into the fermenter was right on target at 1.068.

Unfortunately, fermentation stopped at 1.019, quite a bit higher than we were hoping. Whether that’s because of the malt extract, too little pitched yeast, or oxygenation not working well at 200F, we’re not sure. But it tastes pretty good and is currently carbonating itself with a spunding valve.

Update

Having stopped at 1.019 it was a bit too thick of a beer. So we grew a starter of Wyeast 3711 French Saison (which Wyeast recommends for stuck fermentations) and pitched that into the warmed keg. Let’s see what happens…